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Slugs N' Roses

Team Slugs N' Roses

The Slugs N' Roses team studies the intersection of AI, software engineering, and cybersecurity. In the Nova AI Challenge, we are developing AI agents that learn to write secure code through post-training techniques, enabling them to implement software features while reasoning about security risks introduced during development. Our broader goal is to enable AI-assisted development workflows that are both highly capable and fundamentally secure.

By University of California, Santa Cruz
3 min read
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Team members

Nancy Lau - Team leader

Second-year Computer Science PhD student at UC Santa Cruz. Founded the undergraduate cybersecurity club and led benchmark creation for AI vulnerability detection under SPAR. PhD proposal focuses on secure coding agents via RL, supported by GPU grants from Prime Intellect, Lium.io, and Modal.

Yuqi Chen

PhD student at UC Santa Cruz advised by Prof. Chenguang Wang. Research focuses on foundation models, agentic systems, and LLM safety. Published at NeurIPS and EMNLP; key contributor to the rLLM project on reinforcement learning for agents.

Haoqin Tu

PhD student at UC Santa Cruz advised by Prof. Cihang Xie. Received M.Eng from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Research focuses on natural language generation, multimodal learning, and AI safety, with emphasis on stable multi-turn agentic policies and tool-use systems.

Hardy Chen

First-year PhD student at UC Santa Cruz, advised by Cihang Xie and Yuyin Zhou. Research focuses on vision-language and large language models, especially reasoning, evaluation, and data construction. Develops benchmarks and synthetic training data to study visual reasoning and model biases.

Juanita Gomez

PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz specializing in software supply-chain security and LLM-assisted static analysis. Works with the UCSC Open Source Program Office on scientific open-source software security. Former Spyder IDE developer and current community leader for the Scientific Python project.

Xiaoke Huang

PhD student at UC Santa Cruz researching multimodal reasoning and media generation. Holds M.S. from Tsinghua University and B.S. from Beijing Normal University. Published at CVPR and NeurIPS; interned at Meta and Microsoft Research Asia.

Sebastián Castro

PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz with experience in red teaming, malware analysis, and vulnerability research since 2013. Presented at Black Hat USA and IEEE S&P. Recipient of OpenAI Cybergrant and awards from NSA Director and U.S. Cyber Command.

Sergio Valderrama

PhD student at UC Santa Cruz with over 15 years of expertise in information security and ethical hacking. Founded 2Secure, a leading Latin American cybersecurity consultancy. Spoken at Defcon and Black Hat; holds OSCP and CEH certifications.

Iakov Taranenko

Undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz pursuing master's in computer engineering. Three years of experience in reverse engineering and capability development within Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence community. Leads technical workshops for university security student organization.

Aarav Sharma

Undergraduate Computer Science student at UC Santa Cruz. Interested in computer security, robotics, and formal verification for autonomous systems.

Astra Tsai

Undergraduate Computer Engineering and Computer Science & Game Design major at UC Santa Cruz, interested in reverse engineering. Fastest student to complete NSA Codebreaker Challenge for three years in a row. Supported by an REU and participates in collegiate security competitions.

Raj Nadkarni

Fourth-year Computer Science undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. Interested in the interplay of AI and security, including agentic security and use of agents in cybersecurity operations. Conducting research under Prof. Alvaro Cardenas.

Faculty advisors

Alvaro Cardenas

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. NSF CAREER award recipient with research funded by NSF, ARO, AFOSR, NSA, DHS, Google, OpenAI, and Intel. Research focuses on cybersecurity of cyber-physical systems, including embodied AI, autonomous vehicles, and critical infrastructure.

Chenguang Wang

Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz specializing in trustworthy large language models and reinforcement learning for agents. Received 2024 Google Research Scholar Award. Created impactful open-source systems including rLLM and MassGen.

Cihang Xie

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz (PhD, Johns Hopkins University; M.S., UCLA). Research focuses on adversarial machine learning, computer vision, multimodal learning, and AI safety.

About the Author
University of California, Santa Cruz

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